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Science City Bristol
Bristol has been designated one of Britain’s six Science Cities in recognition of its worldclass scientific research, innovation and development in the university and industrial sectors.
The Bristol city-region is a place where advanced knowledge and its practical application
through the sciences, technology, engineering and new creative industries are driving globally
significant projects. It also has a distinguished science-related history.
From medieval times Bristol’s wealth was based on trade. This comprised the importing,
exporting, processing and manufacture of raw materials and trading goods, activities that
became increasingly specialist as the market grew more sophisticated. Scientific discoveries
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were of commercial benefit to the city included
new processes for producing high-quality spherical shot, and smelting zinc and copper, and
the application of steam-driven technology in the mass-refining of sugar and soap.
Bristol’s commercial prosperity came at the price of terrible environmental damage to the
city: businesses in the heart of the nineteenth-century waterfront for example, included, in
close proximity, an ammonia works, a tar works and a chemical company, each producing a
barrage of noxious fumes. It is perhaps fitting then that Bristol is now recognised as the centre
for so many green initiatives. Among these are the CREATE Centre, where a number of
organisations are working in the field of sustainable development, and the Centre for
Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of the West of England which brings
together environmental scientists to research and find a remedy for the effects of pollution.
Bristol’s original success in trade was dependent on the attractions of its harbour, one of the
best-defended in medieval Britain. The excavation of a cut to divert the course of the River
Frome in 1239 in order to increase the quay space and improve access to the docks was one of
the outstanding engineering feats of the period. In the nineteenth century, Isambard Kingdom
Brunel – one of Britain’s most innovative engineers – made a significant contribution to the
commercial life of the city by providing some practical solutions to the docks on-going silting
problems. The goods-laden merchant ships may have long gone from the heart of the city but
today’s regenerated Harbourside is thriving once more. Watershed Media Centre at the
gateway to the Harbour is a hub for one of the most important sectors in the Bristol economy,
the creative industries. These include natural history film making, animation and digital
technology. Incidentally, Bristol-born photographer William Friese-Greene was
experimenting using celluloid to record movement back in the 1880s, making him the
precursor of modern cinematography. He also patented inventions involving photography, xrays, printing and airships.
Bristol’s waterfront has also long been associated with shipbuilding. Bristol seafarers were
venturing far out across the Atlantic as early as the medieval period in their Bristol-built ships
and the city continued to be known for the quality of its shipbuilding skills until well into the
nineteenth century. Other forms of transport and travel that were pioneered in Bristol include
John Loudon McAdam’s revolutionary ‘macadamised’ highways, the quirky but impressive
charvolant – a carriage powered by kites – of schoolteacher and evangelist George Pocock,
Brunel’s broad gauge railway which ran through Bristol from London to Penzance and,
moving into the early twentieth century – the aeroplane.
Today the aerospace companies clustered north of the city provide an unrivalled source of
knowledge and skills in engineering, transport and advanced technology. From Filton have
also come advances in missile defence systems, including those tested at MBDA’s UK
electro-magnetic compatibility facility. The Bristol city-region was once – regrettably – the
centre of the British chemical warfare industry thanks to the 20 tons of mustard gas produced
per day at Avonmouth during World War One. During World War Two, William Grey Walter
was working on scanning radar technology and guided missiles at the Burden Neurological
Institute in Bristol. He is best remembered for the work he began in the late 1940s at the
Institute on mobile autonomous robots designed to investigate brain functions. This proved to
be a landmark in the fields of both robotics and cybernetics.
A science city needs technology and it also needs thinkers. In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century Bristol was at the forefront of Enlightenment thinking. Visitors to Thomas
Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institution in Bristol in Hotwells who came to enjoy the recreational the
newly discovered laughing gas with Humphrey Davy, included the leaders of the Romantic
movement, Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, and the
philanthropic potter Josiah Wedgwood, member of the influential Lunar Society. Davy’s brief
association with the city ended in 1801 when he joined the Royal Institution in London.
In nearby Bath, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, which is still active in the
city, was founded in 1824 with the aim of furthering ‘the advancement of literature, science
and art’. One of the most famous of the city’s scientists is Caroline Herschel who became the
first woman astronomer to be elected to the Royal Society. Her brother William discovered
Uranus in 1781 using a telescope of his own design. Today, the city-region is connected to the
distant planets through the work of Bristol-born Professor Colin Pillinger, chief scientist of
the Beagle 2 project.
Nobel-prize winning university alumni and staff from Bristol include the Bristol-born Paul
Dirac, who graduated in electrical engineering and mathematics from the University of Bristol
in the 1920s, physicists Cecil Frank Powell, Hans Albrecht Bethe and Sir Nevill Francis Mott,
and chemist Sir William Ramsay. The Institute of Physics Publishing in Bristol, one of the
largest and most dynamic publishers of physics information in the world, sponsored a public
art work created in honour of Paul Dirac which is outside Explore At-Bristol. Dorothy
Hodgkin, the University of Bristol’s Chancellor from 1970-1988, won the 1964 Chemistry
Nobel Prize for work on X-ray diffraction.
Today the research of the West of England universities is increasingly developed in
collaboration with business and the industrial sector, finding practical applications for new
discoveries. Complementing these initiatives, the Science Communication Unit at the
University of the West of England and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of
Bristol are among those actively engaging the public with science, while the South West
Science and Industry Council, whose secretariat is based in Bristol, is promoting a stronger
understanding of the contribution science and technology can make to the economy.